November Huzzah RTT SATURDAY!!! November 22nd, 2014 (NOTE IT IS ON SATURDAY)

November Huzzah RTT SATURDAY 22nd, 2014

Hey all I just wanted to get a post out there. This month's RTT will be on SATURDAY November 22. Hopefully this change of day will make it so more people will be able to attend.

Also we're going to change the format up a bit! This event will be HIGHLANDER! The points will still be 1850. The rules for highlander can be located here and a unit clarification list can be found here. The clarification list will tell you what unit counts for what. An example would be that Eldrad counts as a farseer and a Blood Angel Tactical squad is a Space Marine Tactical squad. If you have any question about the format or a unit count as please feel free to ask!

Please arrive between 10am and 10:30. Round 1 will start around 10:45am. No need to sign up though it is preferred. You can call the store at 703-466-0460 or visit their website www.huzzahhobbies.com for location / number. $15 gets you in and we feed you lunch! We have room for about 30 people, so come one come all!

Can't wait to see you there!

Huzzah Hobbies 40k 1850 RTT 10/19

Huzzah Hobbies 40k 1850 points RTT 10/19

This month's Huzzah Hobbies 40k RTT is this weekend!

Please arrive between 10am and 10:30. Round 1 will start around 10:45am. No need to sign up though it is preferred. You can call the store at 703-466-0460 or visit their website www.huzzahhobbies.com for location / number. $15 gets you in and we feed you lunch! We have room for about 30 people, so come one come all!

The next big event is going to be 11th Company, so we're going to go with their setup and that is NOVA Open Format. Mission Packet is located:
http://www.novaopen.com/wp-content/uploads/Final-GT-and-Invitational-Packet.pdf

FAQ:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13mcnnnPW_nDoAKsWMDOQVnUi3hIizsVrNzppGggzEVs/pub
Please feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Can't wait to see you there!

Huzzah hobbies RTT 9/28

Huzzah Hobbies 40k RTT 9/28

Hey all I just wanted to get a post up and get the word out about this month's Huzzah Hobbies' RTT. So normally its held on the 3rd Sunday of the month, but due to a scheduling conflict it has been pushed back to the 4th Sunday 9/28.

Please arrive between 10am and 10:45. Round 1 will start at 11am. No need to sign up though it is preferred. You can call the store at  703-466-0460 or visit their website www.huzzahhobbies.comfor location / number. We have room for about 30 people, so come one come all!

Since Battle for Salvation is right around the corner we're going to use their format:

Format: NOVA Open: Faqs, List Composition, Win/loss
Missions: 2014 Bay Area Open Mission Pack
Points: 1850

Army Construction:
- You may not select more than 2 total Detachments, and must contain a Primary detachment
- You may not select more than 1 Combined Arms Detachment
- If you do select a Combined Arms Detachment, is must be your Primary detachment
- All Formations, Codices, and Dataslates published by 10/1/2014 are considered legal
- Forgeworld rules will not be legal for 2014
- You may select 0-1 Fortifications from the following: (at this time, no further upgrades to fortifications such as though in Stronghold may be taken)
Aegis Defense Line
Imperial Bastion
Skyshield Landing Platform
Firestorm Redoubt
Vengeance Weapons Battery
- Conjured units are not considered part of an explicit Detachment. As a result, benefits from your Warlord such as Conqueror of Cities and benefits granted by being a part of a given detachment do not apply to Conjured Units. Furthermore, as a RAW clarification, Conjured Models interact with other models as per the Allies Matrix, regardless of the Faction that summoned them.
- Super Heavy/Gargantuan/Escalation Lords of War are not allowed at this time (meaning you can still take Ghaz/Logan and an Imperial Knight, just not a Baneblade). (Subject to change if we get enough people who want these, and if we do change, will likely be using the modified list as per what BAO did)
- An Allied Detachment may be composed of models from the some Faction as your Primary Detachment.

If you have any questions please feel free and ask!

NOVA Open 2014 is behind us now...

Hello,

So I want to start by saying that I absolutely love the NOVA Open. I think the format is pretty spot on, I believe firmly that the FAQ they provide is solid (with a few minor oddities), the terrain is great, the location is nice, and overall it is just a really really great event that I think everyone should attend. Actually other than the 11th Company GT it is by far my favorite event.

Just like most other major GT's the nova has some odd quirks but Mike Brandt and his staff have gone to great lengths to create a fair and fun environment for everyone. If you don't like your games to be so competitive then play in the Narrative! It is a fun campaign event which has a story line that moves forward every year. Each game played actually has an impact on how the story progresses. This event is a fun unique experience and is a must try for anyone planning to attend the NOVA. If you are a truly competitive soul then I can personally recommend the Invitational (you will have to earn a spot though! Check out the nova open website to find out where/when you can earn one) which I have had the honor to participate in two years in a row now. They also have a fast growing Trio's event which hopefully will continue to be available next year as it is a very casual environment that still contains very competitive games.

Lastly of course we have the namesake event, the NOVA Open GT which is a 256 player open brawl. It is made up of 8 games which are used to determine the best of the best on the east coast. The first 4 games are played to determine brackets. Then after each player has been placed in an appropriate bracket using their scores from the first 4 games the event is basically broken up into mini bracket tournaments. Each bracket has a champion determined by win/loss. This system helps to ensure that for at least half of your games you are ideally playing against players of similar skill and army power.

I have to say that I was nervous going into the event this year. With 7th edition having just been dropped on us poor 40k players and the rise of the Imperial Knights...well I will suffice to say I had no idea what to expect as far army composition. I went in expecting to see many Imperial Knights and honestly I saw far less than anticipated. I actually saw significantly more necrons than I expected. I know that Eldar were all over the top bracket but when walking around I felt I saw a fair mix of most armies you would expect to see.

What the NOVA really has going for it is a two part recipe for a great event. Proper terrain and great missions. I heard tons of people complaining about the complicated missions, but I also saw armies that people claim are dead (flying daemon prince based armies and chaos space marines to name a few) winning games because the generals had read/studied the missions beforehand. I agree with the masses, the missions are complex. But this game is complex and with a game like this...we need a more robust mission. The missions that were used allowed for multiple win paths with nearly any army. They are far from perfect, but I think they are going a long way to making this game better. I would challenge anyone who claims the missions are needlessly complex to go play each mission 5-6 times before complaining. Most of the missions are not as hard as you think...they are just different from how Warhammer has traditionally been played.

The other aspect of importance is the terrain. Open tables are a huge problem in 40k. I have been to loads of small and large events where the terrain has just been lacking. I understand how much of an investment terrain can be (both time and money) but it makes a huge difference. If your table lacks terrain the game becomes very one dimensional. A lightly terrain'd table makes for a perfect place for a all shooting gun line army to set up shop. It also makes a great place to use Imperial Knights whose biggest drawback is that they like any other walker are slowed by terrain. But at the NOVA they had very large terrain pieces that often forced a player using Knights to walk through the terrain. It forced players to make choices, take the long way around...or charge through the terrain and risk getting stuck for a few (most likely game changing) turns.

So overall, this years NOVA (my third one!) was another great event. I will definitely be going again next year and I hope to see everyone who reads this there too. Also on the near horizon is the Battle for Salvation GT in New York and the 11th Company GT in South Carolina. I highly recommend both of these events!

-Farseer Tsarith

Another cool update, Team PoweredPlay!

Hey Everyone,


I just wanted to post up that I have been selected to join Team PoweredPlay!
http://poweredplay.net/meet-team-poweredplay/



I am looking forward to all my fellow team members and I am very excited to start lighting up my army with some of their awesome and easy to use lighting kits! Go check them out here: http://poweredplay.net/

Best of luck to my teammates who will be competing this weekend at the Bay Area Open GT!

-Farseer Tsarith

Random thoughts and some army pictures..new warlocks!

Hello,

So I figured I have not posted any newer pictures of my models...So here they are! I have been working on and off to update my warlocks to be..more consistent. The ones I had were a mosh pit of bits that I managed to toss together in my very very poor college days. So a few months ago I ordered the dire avenger swords and shining spear bits to properly build my warlocks. I have just about finished them up, they need to be highlighted and I think I might replace the bikes as well (the ones they are current mounted on are from my salvage bucket) but for the next few events these will do much better than the old poorly converted ones I have been using for the last year or so.

They are all consistent now! (some of the old ones had space marine power swords...)

Just a close up of my Baron Sathonyx model (the free hand was all done by a close friend)

This dude just got some extra highlighting done and I finished magnetizing his arms!

This was the list I was playing last weekend at the Huzzah Hobbies RTT.

In other news I was noodling on Imperial Knights and I am quite convinced that they will probably be out in force at the NOVA Open this year. I heard from my friends who went to the ATC that they were ALL OVER THE PLACE down there. And with the new formation (its in the Red Waaagh campaign book) I expect them to do very very well. The gist of that formation is that it is composed of 3 Imperial Knights and as long as they are within 3 inches of another one of those knights they can re-roll their invulnerable save and a few other things. Even without that formation though they are quite good. I was play testing some beastpack lists the other day (after my success at Adepticon I thought it was worth seeing how they do in 7th edition) but sadly those Imperial Knights can just trollololol all over the little doggies. I think beastpacks can still be made to work in 7th but at the moment I am leaning away from playing them. 

I had another list thought after some discussion with some friends at the RTT and I am noodling on the idea of just saying screw everything and just allying with myself (the NOVA Open is allowing you to ally with your own codex rather than use multiple CAD's) and playing Baharroth instead of using the Baron. The reason I do like this idea is that Baharroth will make a better tank for wounds most of the time and he is an Eternal warrior and still has hit and run.

My main concerns with that list is that it looks roughly like this:

Eldar CAD:

Farseer on bike

Farseer on bike

8 warlocks on bikes

4x3 wind rider squads

3x wraith knights

Allied Eldar:

Baharroth

1x3 wind rider squad

This list has 1 less objective secured unit but the one I dropped is the walking warrior squad which was sort of a liability in most cases anyway. I will need to noodle on this more but I do like the idea of using this instead of the Baron. Actually the cool thing is that all the points to get Baharroth come from dropping the dark eldar detachment and the shard of anaris which is no longer needed as Baharroth is fearless. I could still take some swooping hawks instead of the third wraithknight but I really like the idea of just having a bunch of big smashy toughness 8 monsters running around. In any case I still have a little over a month to noodle on this!

-Farseer Tsarith

Huzzah Hobbies RTT Recap! 7/20/2014

Hello,

So today was the monthly Huzzah Hobbies RTT! We had some good attendance with some Torrent of Fire top 50 players: http://www.torrentoffire.com/rankings

Eric Hoerger, Werner Born, Joe Harmon (Smurfalypse for those who know him by his infamous screen name) Phil Rodokanakis, and Brad Voorhees to name most of them.

Anyway...this was a pretty good NOVA Open prep event. We used 3 of the new primer missions which can be viewed in entirety here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XJ20WB96DzRE635aokDX3XbhOHzw4Xt0UobUZ5j56JM/pub

(I am not going to explain the missions in depth, so if you want to understand the missions completely click on the link above this and go read them!)

I brought my current running 7th edition list:
Farseer on bike (warlord)
Farseer on bike with Shard of Anaris
8x warlocks on bikes
5x3 windrider bike squads
3x wraithknights

Baron sathonyx
1x5 warriors

Round 1:

We did primer mission 1 (Blitz and the Maginot)

Round 1 I played vs a daemon player named Andrew Main. He has a wonky looking army which is mostly composed of large floating sea creatures which are all counts as. It is interesting and he makes everything very clear on what it is.

His list:

herald of khorne
2x10 daemonettes
1x11 pink horrors
15 flesh hounds
9 screamers
2x torrent slaanesh soul grinders

csm allies:
tzeentch lord on disc with daemonheart and other goodies
1x5 cs marines in a rhino
3x nurgle oblits

I chose to do end of game objectives and my opponent took turn by turn. I took first blood, slay the warlord, and marked for death (I marked his warlord, the khorne herald)
Powers wise:
fortune, executioner, doom, guide
terrify, shrouding, prescience

Turn 1:

I won the roll off and set up first. I deployed pretty evenly across the board, my opponent cornered up most of his army. I then promtly made my opponent go first.

Him:
He moves most of dogs and screamers up the left flank and ends up pretty much doing nothing of consequence this turn.

Me:
I cast fortune on my council, prescience a wraithknight, and guide another. My knights shoot some pot shots and kill a dog, a screamer, and a pink horror.

Turn 2:
Him:
He scores 1 point this turn for holding 2 objectives to my 3. A soul grinder and some daemonettes deep strike. He moves his dogs up toward me more but still kind of hangs back. His Tzeentch lord jumps over a ruin and comes solo toward my wraithknight and the screamers move up to support the charge. He fails both charges and his turn ends.

Me:
I cast my powers, they all go off. My wraithknight near the tzeentch lord jumps away and heads toward those screamers. My seer council moves up, shoots, and kills the tzeentch lord. My wraithknight charges and kills most of the screamers (i think 2-3 are left)

Turn 3:
Him:
He charges a wraithknight with the dogs and the herald instant deaths him with a cool axe of khorne. The other soul grinder and daemonettes drop in on my right flank where I have a spare wraithknight and some jetbikes all hanging out. He also scored 1 more point this turn (again 3-3 objectives)

Me:
My council casts all its powers and the end result is everything except fortune failed this turn. I then charged into the khorne dogs and have a wraithknight charge the rear armor of the soul grinder who deep struck on turn 2. I kill like...8-9 dogs with shooting and charging and kill the soul grinder with my wraithknight. However on the right side wraithknight number 3 fails to kill the soul grinder.

Turn 4:
Him: He putters around again for the turn with little to do since most of his army is in combat. (This turn he scores 3 points >.< he holds 3 objectives to my 1) We go into combat...I kill the rest of the dogs and some daemoettes.

Me: I finish off the herald earning the last of my secondaries and then proceed to start sending my council into his back field to deal with his remaining obliterators and marines.

Turn 5:
Him: He earns 1 point, shoots me...and the soul grinder on the right kills off my spare knight >.<

Me: I kill the obliterators...i position with jetbikes to hold 4 objectives if the game ends.

Turn 6:
Him: He moves around and tries to some damage..he cant seem to finish off any units (including a single kabbalite warrior who survives the soul grinder bale flamer!)

The warrior who lived!

Me: I kill off his 5 csm's and then the game ends.

I win 14-10!

Game 2:
This mission was the Heart and Homes mission (relic or turn by turn corner objectives)
 I played vs Lance who was playing an eldar/dark eldar army (mirror match!) not really..he had:

His list:
Eldrad
Spirit seer

7x fire dragons in a serpent
8x banshees in a serpent
2x3 windrider bikes
2x6 warp spiders
baron sathonyx
1x3 trueborn in a venom
1x8 wyches in a raider
beast pack w/ 4 masters, 10 kyhmerae, 4 razorwings

We both had pretty terrible powers, no fortunes and no protects is the highlight, but I did get 3 destructors which probably won me the game tbh.

I won the roll to go first and deployed across the my vanguard line, hiding my council behind the large center ruin. Lance deployed pretty much right across from me. I chose to go first.

Turn 1:
Me: I moved my knights forward and grabbed the relic turn 1. I went cheesy and used an eldritch storm on his clumped up models and targeted his warp spiders..then i scattered onto his beast pack and killed 5-6 of
the dogs.

One of those boys is gonna die!

Him: He killed a wraithknight for first blood with his beast pack but left himself standing mid table.

Turn 2:
Me: I moved my council up, grabbed the relic again and charged and wiped most of his beast pack (baron and the spirit seer lived) but one of my wraithknights punked eldrad. I also renewed 3 wounds back on a wraithknight that was near dead. He hit and ran away to go kill my windrider bikes.

Him: He tried to finish of a wraithknight but failed then he charged my bikes and didnt kill any so we drew combat.

Turn 3:
Me: I killed off his 2 serpents and their contents this turn and otherwise just puttered my troops around and sat on the relic.

Him: He used his "beast pack" to kill some more of my troops but otherwise just moved stuff around.

Turn 4:
Me: I again killed a few more remaining things but otherwise not much changed.

Him: He killed another bike squad and then the game ended.

his baroness killing my bikes on the left..my council holding the center!

9-4 win for me I think (he might have had 6 points)



Game 3:
I played vs Eric Hoerger who was running something close or possibly the same as his ATC list:

GK
coteaz
inquisitor w/ psyker, psycotroke, 3x servo skulls
4x3 henchmen in razorbacks w/ psybolt ammo (psyker and 2x acolytes i think)
2x dreadnoughts w/ double autocannon and psybolt

Guard allies:
yarrick
primaris psyker
2x priest
2x50 guard  blob w/ 5 las cannons each

This game was pretty quick. I got all the powers (fortune, 3 protects) and I won the roll to go deploy first so I did...then I went first. Eric infiltrated a blob due to his warlord trait and deployed a bit further up. He seperated his blobs though which ended poorly. The mission was quarter control, eric chose end of game quarters I chose to drop control tokens.

Turn 1:
Me: I shuffle around, cast powers, and fail to kill a dreadnought with my knights.

Him: he moves his blobs around a bit, shoots 10 las cannons as a wraithknight and doesn't kill it. (A note he probably would have, but I blocked his ignore cover power and then I made probably 2-3 3+ cover saves)

Turn 2:
Me: 4 of my jetbike squads come in I bring them in behind his infiltrated blob and shoot the piss out of his back end. I end up killed something like 15 guardsmen including the priest. My council moves up to charge that blob and finish it off. My wraithknights shuffle around and hold the center line. My council kills most of the blob in combat.

Him: Eric kills a knight and my council kills the blob down to yarrick, the inquisitor and 2 guardsmen. I hit and run away toward the other blob.

Turn 3:
Me: I fail fortune but it doesnt matter...I shoot and charge the other blob with my council and kill something like 25-30 guardsmen between the shots and the charge. Eric swings back and doesnt kill anyone.

At this point I have killed probably over half of his army and in return I lost a wraithknight. Eric asks if we can call the game so he can head on home, I say sure so we end the game here with a 15-0 win for me.

I ended up winning the whole shebang by 1 point over Joe Harmon who also went undefeated with a 3-0 record today. It was another great RTT run by James Watkins (Birdux). Check out his blog over at birdux.blogspot.com!

Thanks for reading guys!

-Farseer Tsarith

Huzzah Hobbies RTT sunday 7/20

Hello,

Just reminding anyone who reads that there is an RTT this sunday (7/20) at Huzzah Hobbies. It usually gets started between 10 and 10:30 so show up! They usually run NOVA style so I would look to that FAQ found here: www.novaopen.com

For RTT specific rules look to: http://birdux.blogspot.com/

He hasnt posted any event specific info yet, but watch his blog for the next few days and I am sure he will post up the information promptly!

I hope to see you all there!!

-Farseer Tsarith

Eldar...Eldar...and more Eldar! oh and don't forget the Daemons!

Hello all,

So I played in the local Huzzah Hobbies RTT (got to birdux.blogspot.com for more info on date/time/place) and it was an interesting jump into 7th. I have since the book came out played a few dozen games (yes I have been QUITE BUSY!) and as with most people I like the edition overall. I dislike the psychic phase (I think its dumb and bla bla bla, no reason to harp on this as this is what we have and I don't believe in making changes to the book and it is far too integrated to really ban in any sensible way).

Anyways...

So this RTT allowed us to try out 2 CAD (combined arms detachments) but limited every player to two sources per list (so 2 CAD, 1 CAD and an ally  detachment, 1 CAD and inquistion, etc etc etc). So of course I jumped on the chance and played this:

Farseer w/ bike
Farseer w/ bike, spear
Farseer w/ bike, spear
Baharroth
9x warlock w/ bikes and 2x spears

4x3 windrider bikes w/ 1 shuriken cannon each
2x wraithknight
1x6 swooping hawk

So the game plan was...roll for fortune or invis (if I played against someone with natural ignore cover (serpents, guard, etc etc) and then roll on whatever is needed. Warlocks would roll a few times on runes of battle and then 4-6 warlocks on malefic daemonology each game. So in 2/3 of games I got fortune and/or invis (the first game I rolled terribly) and 1-2 warlocks got possession and some other goodies. Every game turn 1 I turned a warlock into a Lord of Change (LoC) and he flew around doing more summons while my wraithknights and council did work. The strategy actually was pretty good, but round 2 I ran into 5 imperial knights (a match ive only theorized and never played) and got beaten pretty badly. My wraithknights performed horribly that game, which is unusual as they usually do well vs imperial knights. So I ended up 2-1 for the event but I did beat a droppod space marine army round 1 (17 objective secured units and 22 scoring units i believe) and I beat a draigowing player in game 3 pretty handily due to my very mobile army.

Deny the witch is soooo random by the way. I had many times throwing 15-16 dice hoping for just 1-2 6's and still you cant fail. I know those charts are apps are all over the place (hell I did the math for the Torrent of Fire power app) and still it can be surprising how difficult it is to block a power. I think that is the true weakness of 7th edition psykers, one turn you get everything off no problems, the next turn everything fails. Yes that happened in old editions but with a prevalence of LD 10 it was rare. Most games you would only see 1-2 powers fail to go off. Now you could easily see 1-2 turns where most powers fail to go off or are blocked by denial dice. Also the crazy amount of dice needed to have decent odds means that most armies going all into the psychic phase don't really have a shooting phase. Yes your opponent might summon 500ish points of stuff...but if you then kill that 500ish points you have actually more than leveled the playing field as the stuff that those daemon armies have..its not good at much else besides summoning. Then if in a good turn you kill the summoned stuff AND some actual stuff..well you can actually quite easily do near catastrophic damage to most summoning armies with a few well placed shots (example: opponent has 3-5 units of 11-16 man horror units...kill a few horrors in each unit and you drop their army by 3-10 warp charges, which a shooty army can easily do in a single turn).

I think that double CAD is really no worse than what we get with normal lists but I can see plenty of places keeping the old 6th edition limit of 1 CAD and some other detachment type for the second source. That is fine by me as honestly I would like to run a third wraithknight and if I lose baharroth, a farseer, and the hawks I get just enough space for this:

Farseer w/ bike
Farseer w/ bike, spear
Baron Sathonyx
9x warlock w/ bikes and 2x spears
1x5 kabbalite warriors
5x3 windrider bikes
3x wraithknight

Now that...that looks fun! I have come to realize that I just really really like wraithknights. I know they have bad match ups (venoms...mass str7 can take them down too) but they are fun and assaulty and tough! Which is fun for eldar. My other possible list I am looking at in a world that dissallows two CAD's is something like:

Autarch
1x5 fire dragons in a serpent w/ scatter laser, ghostwalk, shuriken cannon
4x5 dire avengers in a serpent w/ scatter laser, ghostwalk, shuriken cannon
3x wraithknight

It has lots of firepower, good ways to kill high AV, can easily kill low AV, and infantry. But it is 100% empty on the psychic phase which...I am not sure about. It should be fine as the loads of shooting and assault power in the serpents and the wraithknights should kill tons of stuff and dissuade things from coming near me. I don't know though, I love playing a seer council but...it would be nice to have 8 objective secured units in my army!

In any case none of these lists require me to buy anything new (I just have to build/paint that third wraithknight, but that should only take a day or so). Hopefully I'll start getting some games in with these two lists and I can decide if this really is the way I want to go. I know most people love hawks and I agree they are amazing, but sadly whenever I bring them..they never seem to really do what I need them to do. Hence why I am leaning toward just taking what I know and love (wraithknights and warlocks :D).

On another note, I spent a number of games trying to use a beastpack with 5 spiritseers and Eldrad...it works well..but I actually just think the seer council ends up performing better in many match ups now. Anyway I will probably discuss the beastpack more next week.

Regards,

-Tsarith

7th edition early games etc...

So I played a game today with a friend and we tried out some more of the new edition fun stuff.

He played a daemon army using:
3 FMC Tzeentch princes
lord of change
4x heralds of tzeentch
3x11 pink horrors

I played:
Eldrad
5xSpiritseer
5x3 windrider bikes
2x wraithknights
Baron Sathonyx
1x5 kabbalite warriors in a venom w/ night shield, grisly trophies, and an extra splinter cannon
5x beastmaster w/ 20x khymerae, 2x razorwing flock

We played a big guns never tire mission, had 4 objectives, used dawn of war deployment, and night fight.
I won the roll to go first (thanks to the bonus from Baron as usual!) so I set up first and then redeployed with Eldrad and chose to still go first as well. To preface the game, we used ALOT of terrain and we had 4 12x12inch based ruins that we called the whole thing the new kind of ruin so just touching the base gave you the lovely 4+ cover save. We also used two large forests which we used the new GW forest so it still granted a 5+ cover for being in it. Lastly we used two large hills which we called difficult terrain on top so they would grant a 6+ cover for standing on top and as a hill it would give a 5+ if it obscured you. (If any of these terrain ruling seem wrong please comment!)

So we have two armies here with LOADS of psychic potential. The daemon army clocks in at 30 warp charges and my eldar army starts with 14. So I am severely outclassed in total casting power right off the bat. We both rolled for lots of telepathy and daemonology powers. I used spiritseers to roll on telepathy until i rolled an invisibility (I got it on the 5th roll and then I rolled straight daemonology stuff) I got 2 possessions on spirit seers, an incursion, and I ended up with 3 spiritseers with the summoning. Eldrad rolled on runes of fate and got crap powers...so he didnt do much all game. My daemon opponent had a solid mix of all the daemonology powers and he also had an invisibility and a smattering of biomancy powers (one endurance I believe).

I am not going to go into extensive details of the game itself as we only played 3 turns (we spent alot of time discussing rules and making sure we did everything as close to right as possible, so we wasted ALOT of time) but I don't actually think the game takes longer to play than before. What I mean is that although we have an extra phase...those players who used psykers before already had that phase it was just split between shooting and beginning of turn casting. So for me (I have been playing seer councils...) it is not a huge extra time sink. If anything its actually nice to have all the powers happen at once in such a clearly structured way.

So we had some interesting situations arise. The first to discuss is that denying powers is hard. Sometimes it feels damn near impossible. But thats not a bad thing IMO. The reason is that in 6th edition unless you played space wolves you flat out period, could do NOTHING about my casting blessings and as Torrent of Fire was kind enough to share, I had about a 90ish% chance to cast my power. In most cases now I have found that honestly, I fail powers. Several times I tossed 6-7 dice at a warp charge 2 power and failed. I also had a number of times I failed to cast a daemonology power and suffered a perils for my trouble. Rolling 8 dice, getting all 1's, 2's, and 3's is rather sad. But it happens! I also had an instance in my game where on turn 2 my spiritseer turned into a lord of change and then on turn 3 I had forgotten about the "One Eye Open" rule and I ended up rolling a 1 for my Lord of Change so he sat and did nothing all turn. I doubt many players will make that error, but sometimes you cant avoid it. If you are using these new powers and you are not daemons then at times you will just scatter badly and then you will have to take those checks.

I also came to the conclusion that windrider jetbikes are very good at killing pink horrors :D I had 3 units go over and kill 11 pink horrors and 2 heralds of tzeentch between shooting and charging.  Now what was a bit annoying was that we both had invisible units. Two invisible units fighting it out in close combat is a bit silly. So in some regards this kind of match up is just about who gets their powers off. But that is more our fault as players. We both chose to bring this style of list. I actually feel we had some really cool psychic battles going. Now I have yet to really try a game using my psychic style list vs a non psyker oriented army. I fear it will feel one sided, but I am also a bit fearful that honestly that army might slaughter everything else in my army other than my one beefed up psychic unit.


So I look forward to more test games with this edition. On a side note has anyone considered this:

So due to come the apocolypse allies you cannot deploy within 12 inches. When you deepstrike you are told to "deploy your models" but you have to per the daemonology tree deepstrike within 6-12 inches (power depending)...but being unable to deploy like this does not cause a mishap. So if you summon...does this mean you cant summon unless you scatter out? Or is this some sort of accidental error? I am (for now) assuming that I can summon freely and just suffer the One Eye Open rule if on my next turn I am still within 6 inches of those units. The reason being is that this specific (not allowed to deploy) is not listed as a thing that can cause a mishap. Also my view is that the not allowed to deploy statement is meant in reference to beginning the game. I see how I could be wrong..but again then it seems odd as it is impossible for anyone but Daemons or CSM to use the conjuration powers. If that is the case...then that does seem a bit unfair if only those two armies can use those powers.

Thats all I have so far guys...

-Farseer Tsarith

7th Edition impending in 24 hours....

!?!?! 7th Edition!?

So tomorrow afternoon/evening many people will have hands on the new rule book. I know so far we have loads of confirmed rumors and even pictures of books from notable names such as Kirby over at 3++. But I will be holding most of my thoughts close to the chest until I have looked at the book with my own eyes (hopefully tomorrow afternoon).

However looking at what is confirmed so far...

It seems that psychic armies will be even more of the hotness, well at least those psychic armies with access to loads of psychic units and more than a few mastery level 3 units (Daemons and Eldar?). It sort of seems that we will have basically Eldar and Daemons taking psykers and few other races will bother as they will just see their powers constantly denied unless of course some mechanic for limiting the amount of dice you can use to deny powers comes into play. However given how many books are out there already and that NO ONE has said anything about something like that...I am assuming that there will just be "have" and "have nots" as far as powers go.

I am happy about how battle forged troops will get benefits to scoring (uncontestable accept by other troops or units with objective secured) but it will be nice that if all my troops are killed I can potentially score with my non troop choices as well. I also particularly like what I have read a few times about FMC's not being able to score while swooping (I am not sure if this was debunked or is confirmed it was just something I remember reading on the many sites I frequent). But I do personally think that FMC based armies needed a bit of a nerf as far as how easy it was to bully an opponent with 4-5 flying 300 point monsters. I think the power inherent in playing tons of them (loads of mastery level dice) and the addition of the daemonology tree (summoning....) should balance that out for those players so they wont feel their army got nerfed to death...it is more changing. Honestly I think it might be even more powerful than before it will just play differently. I expect Belakor will be making more appearances since invisibility is pretty boss now (consider putting it on an FMC who switches modes so it still can only be snap fired at accept....skyfire wont matter as far as shooting at that particular guy). But all of those kinds of wonky strategy will be quite risky assuming the psychic phase happens after moving...well you have to decide if you want to drop out of flight mode and risk failing that crucial psychic power.

I am expecting that my style lists (Eldar Seer Council and Eldar/Dark Eldar Beast Pack) will remain strong if not gain a bit of strength as the armies that I will now fear are an even smaller pool (just other equally psychic beefy armies). And things like O'Vesa Star are effectively dead (no joining FMC's with IC's should kill that list nicely, although Tau will still be strong, riptides are quite powerful even if they dont get loads of special rules).

I sure am glad I built/painted those Daemon prince's a few weeks ago...I forsee them getting alot of play time in the future.

Well thats all I have for now..but I expect I will be posting again in a few days once I have my book!

-Farseer Tsarith

So...Kill Team!?

So I had the pleasure of playing Kill Team a few days ago...it's pretty fun. It plays very much like War Machine but you get to use all of your cool 40k models. I have only managed to win 2 games thus far, but it is cool. A run down for those who don't know the basics:

-The game size is limited to 200 points
-You may not take anything with a save better than a 3+ and no model can have more than 3 wounds
-Your army is composed of up to: 2 troops, 1 elite, 1 fast attack
-No flyers
-No reserves of any kind except for outflank
-Everything scores (even vehicles!) unless it specifically says it does not (example death company)
-You play on a 4x4 table

You get to select 3 guys to be "specialists" meaning they get to pick a special rule from a table. You also nominate one guy to be the "leader" who gets to roll for a leader trait each game.

In the game every model acts independently so units that naturally are of size 1+ are great as you can just buy the 1 guy. Things like guardian squads are iffy as they come stock standard with 10 guys...but each guy alone is less than spectacular. Anyone some early lists I have been playing with:

Dark Eldar:
3x trueborn w/ 2x splinter cannon and a blaster in a venom
1x beastmaster w/ 5x khymerae

This list worked alright, although I have found that space marines are just the fucking shit at this game. As expected a guy in power armor functions in this game much like how they did back in the hay day of 40k. The lack of 2+ saves and the fact that power weapons and low ap guns are fairly rare makes having that best of saves really really nice. Also space marines naturally have loads of special rules (sterngard...jump packs) etc etc.

So with that in mind I played against my brother wielding this list:

Raven Guard:
5x assault marines w/ 2x flamers
5x scouts w/ a melta bomb in a land speeder storm

In almost all of our games he was able to crush me due to his entire army having combinations of infiltrate, scout, and outflank. Outflank is retarded good in this game. As each model acts independently they come in on their own and with the smaller table size and moving 12 inches...assault marines are just really really good. With the basic marine kit (grenades, bolt pistol, close combat weapon) they can threaten just about anything and with the alpha strike they do really really well.

So...the list I finally managed to win with is similar but I used Dark Angels.

Dark Angels:
3x black knight
5x scouts w/ a heavy bolter

Basically I went second so my outflankers out flanked his outflankers and used their plasma talons to rip apart the assault marines.

I highly recommend anyone who plays 40k to pick up this little book from GW as its a cool fun game. It also only takes about...20 minutes to learn the rules if you already play 40k and each game takes 20-30 minutes tops to play.

In other news I am working on painting up more of my Tau stuff to help me combat the new Astra Militarum book...which is pretty freaking awesome. You can cram something like 33+ las cannons into a single list...and with easy access to prescience and ignore cover orders..you should wreck most things. I will need to play test more against this new threat before I can determine if my warlocks and/or my beast pack can handle them.

So in closing... TRY KILL TEAM! It's alot of fun and it is a nice quick game to play when you don't have the time or drive to play a full game of 40k.

-Farseer Tsarith

De La Warr!!! Asymmetrical Missions!? Results?!

Hello,

It has been a crazy two weeks with Adepticon last week and the De La Warr Open this past weekend. I attended both and as I mentioned I did decently well at Adepticon last week and again I think I performed quite well at the De La Warr Open. So to start this event utilized all of the new asymmetrical missions that Mike Brandt and the other TO's have been working on (the goal of these missions being to allow the weaker army builds (non death stars!) to excel). I honestly think that the goal was pretty successful, yes a death star did win the Best General Prize, but battle master was won by a non death star list (it was actually a fluffy Ravenwing army piloted by Matt Defranza). There were also a number of Daemon FMC armies in attendance, actually none other than Justin Cook (the NOVA GT winner) was running Nick Nanavatis Adepticon army which did JUST LAST WEEK win Adepticon. So these missions are very complicated and need a bit more refinement in the wording still but I highly recommend using them, they can be found at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XJ20WB96DzRE635aokDX3XbhOHzw4Xt0UobUZ5j56JM/pub

So the games:

I was running my exact Adepticon list:
Shard Seer (warlord)
Eldrad
Baron
Beast pack (20x khymerae, 2x razorwing flock, 5x beast master)
1x5 kabalite warriors
4x3 windrider squads
2x wraithknights
sky shield landing pad
2x6 swooping hawks
inquisitor w/ 3x servo skulls

My first game was against:
a fairly old fashioned Draigo-wing army.

Lord Draigo
Coteaz
10x paladin w/ 4x psy cannons, apoth, some halbards, and some swords.
1x1 paladin (scoring unit obvi)
3x3 henchmen units
1x10 interceptor squad
dreadknight w/ flamer and teleporter
ordo xenos inquisitor w/ 3x servo skulls and liber heresius

The game:

I got solid powers (that means fortune and invisibility wooohoooo)

It turns out the invisibility was clutch for the game as it basically neutralized any shooting he could have done to me and it crippled his combat power. The game was pretty much my beast pack fighting his paladin unit in the center of the table for 8 rounds of combat with me slowly wearing him down and my hawks and wraithknights running around killing everything else. It would have been much more difficult but I was able to kill the dreadknight turn 1 due to it failing 4/8 armor saves. The army is actually pretty solid if only those pesky tau riptides didnt exist (they really do a number on paladins). But over all it was fun, my opponent was friendly and we had a good time. I made baron do a cool epic challenge with draigo in the bottom of turn 6 or 7 which was legend....wait for it....DARY LEGENDARY! Anyway I advanced to round two with a full 15 points from round 1.

Game 2:

This round I played a well known GT winner Matt Defranza (he is most well known for his very powerful seer council list which he plays quite well). But for this event he was running his Ravenguard which he has been running on and off to my knowledge at his local game store but this was its first appearance at a GT. Anyway I again received decent enough powers. This game was the relic or you could do turn by turn objectives (every turn you hold it you get a point etc etc). I chose the relic and he chose the turn by turn objective as his army was well suited for board control. He had:

Shrike
command squad in drop pod w/ 5x melta
2x10 scouts
4x10 tactical marines in rhinos w/ melta gun, multi melta, combi melta, melta bomb
10x assault marines w/ melta bomb
2x thunder fire cannon

He combat squad-ed the whole army and rushed his rhinos forward to block me from grabbing the relic early. I mitigated round one shooting by hiding under my sky shield. Sadly he got a bit out of whack and thought my beast pack scored this round so he hesitated on the mid field and i was able to get my pack all over the objective and start killing rhinos and marines. If he had realized it didn't score a turn sooner he could have just dumped 40 marines on top of it which at the least could have kept me off it until turn 4-5 which would have let him get enough ahead on points so it wouldn't matter if I picked up the relic. In the end I won 11-10 (mostly because I got line breaker and he did not).

Game 3:

This round was straight kill points and I was playing against NOVA local Brad Voorhees and his Ovesa Star list. I have actually played and beaten Brad before but this time would be different.

Brad's list:

Farsight
buff commander (no hit and run, this confused me and ultimately tempted me to make a huge fatal error, so good job brad)

O' Vesa
heavy burst cannon riptide
2x ion accel rip tides

1x6 fire warriors
1x3 suits with flamers
4x1 suits (half of them had flamers)
3x sky ray
inquisitor w/ servo skulls

I did well early by killing all the sky rays and getting a riptide. I should have backed off after that (note I did not roll fortune this game, this was probably the only game I actually NEEDED to have it...so boo for me i suppose) anyway I would have actually been fine if I'd done that. I could have drawn brad back onto my side and used characters to soak some damage. But I got greedy and thought I could catch Ovesa who was without hit and run. This led to a 2 turn chase in which I skipped out on 3 easy kill points and let brad pummel me with fire power. The lesson is to keep the focus on the mission and especially in these new missions, 1-2 tactical errors will lead to a quick defeat. I ended up losing but Brad only got 5 points off of the game so I did manage to really keep him from pulling ahead of me battle points wise.

Game 4:

This game was against a space marine/dark angel army consisting of:

Beat face chapter master
1x10 tactical squad in a rhino
2x5 tactical squad in a rhino
2x5 scouts (one of these was the dark angel troop choice)
2x2 attack bike squads
2x5 devastators w/ las cannons
thunder fire cannon
Ravenwing command squad
Dark Angel Libby on a bike

I pretty crappy powers but I did manage to swing fortune on the last roll...so that was nice i suppose. Our HQ's all met in the middle of the table round 1...bounced off each other and then I spent about 2 turns killing the bike command squad and the chapter master. While my beast pack dealt with that my wraithknights ran up the other flank and killed off the thunder fire and the devastator squads. At the end of 4 my opponent conceded and we took an early lunch. I proceeded to round 5 with a total of 41 battle points and a 3-1 record.

Game 5:

At this point the event only had one 4-0 player (TJ Meyers and his O'Vesa army). He ended up playing Matt Defranza. There game basically was set up like thus, if TJ beat Matt then TJ would be the Best General. If Matt Beat TJ and got a decent amount of points he would win Best General purely on Battle points. If the pummeled eachother and neither got a load of points I would actually have jumped ahead and even with my loss to Brad win the whole shebang.

My opponent played:
Wolves and Tau
Logan Grimnar
2x rune priest
1x wolf priest
3x7 wolf guard in drop pods lots of combi plasma and combi flamers

Cadre fire blade
riptide w/ ion accel
12x fire warriors
3x broadsides

I ended up winning by a small margin and adding another 12 battle points to bring my total up to 53 battle points and a 4-1 record. TJ won his game and claimed the Best General Prize with a total of 53 battle points and a 5-0 record. He received a huge amount of Ork models (pretty much a decent sized army) and the coveted NOVA Invitational ticket. Matt Defranza ended up with the most battle points at I believe 57 (that was a with a 3-2 record). I think that right there shows some good missions with a ton of victory paths. He was able to to LOSE TWO GAMES and still even in defeat in some of the missions you can score 12-15 points. Congratulations to him and the large amount of Imperial Guard he received. I ended up winning Best Overall/Renaissances Man which awarded me approx 325 of Space Marine loot and the NOVA Invitational Alternate Ticket.

A picture of my prizes!

So over-all it was a great event and I hope to attend it again next year. The Icehouse Warriors put on a great event and it was a blast.

-Farseer Tsarith

Adepticon Results! Best Xenos!!

Hello,

I just got back from Adepticon last night (I left after the GT as I was not participating in the Team Event). It was a blast and I will post up some more information about my games later this week. But the long story short is that I did quite well day 1. I went 4-0 and achieved my goal of making it into the top 16 (huge achievement for my FIRST Adepticon!) I also won Best Xenos Showing for day 1 and I was third overall (just a few points shy of best overall actually!). Anyway my good friend Robert Tilly went on to beat me pretty soundly game one of day 2 and then he went all the way to the top two and was defeated by none other than Nick Nanavati who can now claim to have won Adepticon two years running. So overall Adepticon was a great experience and I think I will probably try to attend next year. I want to shout out to my great opponents who tolerated my silly deathstar list and were even kind enough to give me some good sportsmanship points! So without further ado thanks to Curtis Kamitski (playing Dark Eldar/Eldar), Nick
Rose (playing Eldar), Matt Root (playing Necrons), and Jonathan Willingham (playing Tau). I will post up some battle details in a week or two when I get some more time but all 4 of those games were tough solid games against some very strong opponents.

Thanks for a great first Adepticon guys!

-Farseer Tsarith

Getting Pumped for ADEPTICON! (and some new stuff!)

Hello everyone!

I am getting really REALLY excited for my first Adepticon! I have been not doing much to prepare as most of my models have been done for months. I did some extra dry brush coats and touched up the washes on my warlocks and my beast pack (I am still debating which list to bring...but that's pretty typical for me). I am sort of expecting loads of centurion type star armies to be present (after the big space marine win at TOF invitational) and of course the prevalent love of space marines it seems an easy choice. As well as those kinds of lists I expect a bunch of bike armies but we will see I guess. 

I actually am thinking that many council players will be disappearing in the next few months as centurion death stars with all the inquisition stuff and Imperial Knights give the seer council a rough shake. Anyway I have no plans to abandon my lovely warlocks but I am working to mess around with some other armies (Playing other things has been improving my game play and in game decision making). 

I like the concept of the beast pack as it plays very similar to my council but it suffers less without fortune than the warlocks do. Also I am getting to the point where I think if I want to play my warlocks I should ditch Eldrad for the mobility of the second farseer on the bike. But if I use the beast pack Eldrad fits right in as the whole unit is a bit slower and this means that Eldrad can keep up a bit better (also the huge footprint of the unit means dragging him along is not a huge deal). Anyway I'll be taking some pictures of my models for display board placement choices later today or tomorrow so I will be sure to post those images up here. 

In other news I sold off my imperial guard allied detachment and almost my entire ravenwing/bike army. I then used that cash to start a small Daemon Army! So Ordo-Bob when you read this..I let some of the evil darkness in! So without further ado...here are some pictures of the newest members of my collection!

The Black mace prince! the armor plates are blue with gold trim which will be the main colors of the army. The black maceis a bunch of bits and green stuff all hand molded to create what I think is a cool, big, nasty looking mace for this guy to wield. 

This guy is just a generic Daemon Prince (I call him my Daemon Ork!) he comes with his very own, very bloody sword! Again I did the blue and gold armor plates to try to show some cohesion (my Initial thoughts are that all the Daemon Princes are Company Captains from some as yet to be named traitor chapter.

This is my Axe Prince (another generic Daemon Prince) he again has that same armor plating and his axe is also covered in that new Citadel Blood Effect paint. I'm actually really happy with how the basing came out, I wanted some grass (but not too much as I figure the corrupting presence of the Daemons would probably kill most of the grass. I also bought those black stones a few weeks ago and I had been trying to figure out a way to use them with my Eldar and...that just wasnt working.

Next up we have a heldrake (who doesn't have one right?!) I was a bit nervous to start painting one of these things. It took HOURS like..7-8 hours to do all that trim and it honestly still needs to be touched up. But what ever..its done enough for me. I just need to do his base (I hadn't decided how to do the bases yet when I did him...I actually didn't figure out how to do the bases until yesterday right before bed!)

Lastly is just a picture of all the models i currently have. I am still waiting on Fateweaver to get here (I one on eBay for real cheap so who knows...it might not show up for another few weeks as I think its coming from China or maybe Russia..? Anyway...I have 30 pink (blue) horrors on the far left and next to them is a set of 20 daemonettes. I figure that's probably enough small daemons and the guys behind the black mace prince primed bright blue is a set of 10 cultists. For now I am quite happy with these things as they have been a blast to build and paint. But I don't really know if I will keep this army long term. I got most of these things discounted so I may just paint it all up and eBay after a few RTT's if I don't like the play style.

Anyway..thats all the news I have..as I said I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow of my Eldar armies on the display board. 

Regards,

Farseer Tsarith

Codex: Imperial Knights. is here! Uh oh...

Hello,

So I usually don't bother posting too much about new releases not pertaining to my armies...but I am a bit fearful of the newest thing from Games Workshop. So lets start that from a fluff perspective I love the Imperial Knights. They are fun, exciting, and a cool breadth of fresh air. However...as T.O's look at this new book I hope they will look past the "D weapons will end death stars thought process" because...no they won't. Anyone who thinks that is pretty much a fool...we have had deathstar 40k since I started playing warhammer back in 3rd edition and its not going anywhere. What we WILL HAVE is deathstar 40k + a bunch of imperial knights. So to start...we shall have a sample list I just created which...would be quite rude.

Farseer (shard of anaris, both runes, bike, spear)
Farseer (soulshrive, both runes, bike, spear)
Baron Sathonyx
Beast pack (5 beast masters, 20 kyhmeras, 2 razorwing flocks)
5x3 windrider jetbike squads
1x5 kabalite warrior squad
2x Knight Paladin

So this....This is a pretty standard beast-star list which literally lost nothing except it exchanged its old heavy support units for 2 Imperial Knights...so you come across this army..which was already nearly un-killable and quite annoying except now the OTHER deathstars which did at least provide counters for it are no longer even a concern...because you simply throw a Knight into the other deathstar and even if the other deathstar kills your Knight...when the Knight explodes it will take out most of the that death-star with it. So given that example I am sure you readers can all come up with other silly lists that also abuse this new detachment (I cant wait to see the space marine centurion death stars taking an Imperial Knight as well) All we are doing by using this new "codex" is forcing all the players to go out and buy 1-3 Knights...It won't change anything. We will still be playing death-star 40k...so honestly I suggest we just leave the Imperial Knight Codex at home...the codex doesn't need to be banned...that's wrong..simply continue with what we are doing at events and say, "No units with D-Weapons are allowed." But if we allow un-restricted use of this new unit then I do think it would be unfair to continue disallowing the usage of other Titans and such. Personally I think Codex: Imperial Knights should be reserved for events that use Escalation and Stronghold Assault. It really isn't that the unit itself is too crazy strong...it just seems dumb to me that the already very powerful armies get these things...and the other weak armies get nothing.

Another silly list:
Farseer (shard of anaris, both runes, bike, spear)
Farseer (both runes, bike, spear)
Baron Sathonyx
8x warlocks on bikes (2x spears)
4x3 windrider bike squads
1x5 kabalite warrior squad
2x Knight Paladin

Or how about:

Iron Hands:
Chapter master (bike, shield eternal, thunder hammer, artificer armor)
2x5 scouts
1x4Centurion Devastators (grav cannons, sergeant with twin linked las and omniscope)
Ultramarine allies:
Tigurius
1x5 scouts
Inquisition Allies:
Coteaz
Xenos Inquisitor (rad grenades, psychotroke grenades, liber heresius, 3x servo skulls)
Imperial Knight Allies:
2xKnight Paladin

So...I'd like to know how the addition of this extra detachment changes deathstar 40k..? I mean you send your Knights into your opponents knights...abuse charging through cover rules to keep your deathstar from getting really charged by the enemy knights...and then use your deathstar to kill the meager amount of other stuff your opponent has...I like the Knights I really do...I just don't see how they solve any problems..I think they merely continue to aggravate an already bad situation. It just seems like the already annoying abusive armies will just take them (I know I probably will go pick up a pair of them if I get the green light from a few major events).

Anyway..I am sure I will post up more thoughts in the next week or so...but I want to close with this.

I really do like that Games Workshop is giving us so much more to play with...but just as the warmachine community does for competitive play...we can as a community continue to allow/disallow on an event by event basis whatever we want. Just because GW says you CAN use something, does not mean you HAVE to use it.

-Farseer Tsarith

(PS I am sure those are not the MOST abusive lists they are just what I came up with after my first look through of the codex, I have not compared the two Knight variants much I just picked the more expensive one for my theory lists)

Torrent of Fire Invitational! Results! Yay!

 Hello,

So the Torrent of Fire Invitational is over and the results are in! I am happy to inform any loyal readers that I performed better than I expected (although not quite what I had hoped!). You can check out the results here: torrentoffire.com and the direct link to the article is: http://www.torrentoffire.com/3755/thats-the-chicago-way-tim-gorhams-the-champion.

Anyway so the event itself was a very well run, the missions were a nice mix of east coast, west coast, and adepticon style missions. The first round was the primer mission 1 which was created by Mike Brandt and honestly although it is a hard mission, it is well designed. More missions like this would be great! I also really enjoyed the pre-brackets, it added another layer of tactics as I thought about my potential match-ups but it also removed some stress as I was able to focus on my likely early round matches instead of it just being a complete and utter mystery. So all in all, it a was a great event which I hope I will be invited to again next year. Great job Chip and the Torrent of Fire crew!

So I didnt take too many pictures so I think I can run through each game pretty quick to give a recap of my experience:

All of the lists for players can be found: http://www.torrentoffire.com/tof_inv

So I wont go into too much detail but I will summarize the lists and highlight major things from the games.

Game 1:
TJ Meyers running a Tau/Space Marine/Inquisition
Farsight
Ovesa
Sha'vastos (puretide, vectored retro, shield generator)
riptide w/ talisman of arthas malach, target lock
5x1 crisis suits w/ 2x flamers
1x3 crisis suit w/ 2x flamers each
skyray
broadsides w/ high yield missiles
Tigurius
1x5 scouts
thunderfire
xenos inquisitor w/ 3x servo skulls

My powers:
Eldrad: death mission, executioner, eldritch storm, guide
Shardseer: executioner, mind war, guide
Warlord trait:I got scoring! (this was clutch for this game to be honest)

So not rolling fortune game one...rather sucked but it was interesting, of the 4 people running some form of seer council only ONE PERSON rolled fortune in round one! But oh well. Anyway TJ and I both flopped big time on turn one shooting, but in turn two I managed to remove the broadsides with my riptide (if I recall correctly I killed 1 of them and then the other 2 ran off the table). Other than that I hid from him for most of the game and scored points each turn (this was mission primer one so I was able to score 1 point each turn I held an objective and with a scoring warlord it was not hard to get a minimum of 2 points a turn) and put all my focus toward killing his small crisis suit teams. Something that really helped was honestly that in total both of our shooting was terrible. But it hurt TJ more than me since as a tau primary...shooting is mostly all the army has. In any case the highlight was my one jetbike who was shot by the thunderfire cannon in every turn of the game and still surived to the end, making 2-3 armor saves a turn.

On turn 6 TJ and I ended up having our death stars do some battle in the mid-field which looked like this:

So the game ended with me scoring 10 points and winning by a small margin. It was a super tight game and it could have easily gone much better for TJ if the shooting phases had been a bit more lucrative.

Game 2:

Simon Leen running Sisters of Battle/Inquisition

His army was mostly MSU it had something like:

Cannoness

2x5 Sisters of battle troop squads with lots of flamers inside rhino's

3x5 dominion sister units w/ 5 melta guns each inside immolators w/ twin linked multi-meltas

3x exorcists

coteaz

xenos inquisitor w/ rad grenades, liber heresius (lets his unit scout)

a big deathcult deathstar in a landraider crusader

2x3 acolyte units

My powers:

Eldrad: mind war, fortune, misfortune, perfect timing

Farseer: guide, perfect timing, prescience

(these powers are soooo much better than last time!)

Simon was rolling off a victory over Tony Kopach running his version of the seer council with wave serpent support. When I rolled fortune he looked less than optimistic but he did go first and made a solid attempt at crippling me. However this event was very well terrain-ed so I was able to hide my council and ended up just having my bastion blown up turn 1. Afterward I shot forward with my powered up council and ate the landraider crusader, the deathcults, and the dominion squads. After that it was pretty much just a game running around and killing the remaining units. The game ended with a victory for the seer council some maxed out battle points!

Game 3:

Tim Gorham running Iron Hands/Ultramarines/Inquisition

2 beefy biker lords

a grav centurion squad

tigurius

coteaz

xenos inquisitor w/ all the grenades

2x stalkers

2x5 scouts

1x5 legion of the damned unit w/ plasma

2x3 acolytes in razorbacks

My powers:

Eldrad: mind war executioner, fortune, prescience

Farseer: Guide, scriers gaze, misfortune 

Tim played a decent game and had some luck early on which helped him greatly. Turn one (he went first) he moved forward and dropped the two orbital bombardments on my council, i spaced pretty well so he only got 2-3 hits on either one but he put 1 right on top of the shardseer who promptly failed 2/3 look out sirs and then failed an invulnerable save and died (this gave Tim first blood and warlord in one swoop which actually won him the game). Other than that we moved around our deathstars fought, I probably should have played it cagey and just hung back all game but if his deathstar had broken, my farseer had not died turn one, or if I could have gotten a big hit and run move off his unit, then I most likely could have done much better. I will need to watch iron hands players in the future, I recall that during the game some feel no pains were taken on a 5+ (most likely IF this happened it was 100% accidental/heat of the moment/excitement induced). It is an easy mistake to make IF it happened. In any case the lesson for me is to pay take a closer look at the space marine codex and make sure I know everything about my opponents rules. Congrats to Tim on a well fought victory, he won the game 10-9. Hopefully I'll get a rematch at Adepticon this year!

Game 4:

Brad Nichols Tau/Tau

Primary Tau 

Commander, 2 melta, target lock, vectored thrusters, iridium armor, 

puretide, 2 shield drones 

Commander, flamer, vectored thrusters, command node, sensor suite, drone 

controller, 2 marker drones 

Riptide, Ion, melta, interceptor 

10 kroot 

2x6 fire warriors 

Skyray, smart missiles, blacksun 

Longstrike, submunitions, 2 seeker missiles, sensor spines, smart missiles 

3 broadsides, high yield missiles, 3 target locks, 6 missile drones 

Ally Farsight 

Ethereal 

Riptide, Ion, melta, interceptor, talisman, earth caste 

3 crisis suites, 2 missile pods and target locks each, bonding knives, 6 

marker drones 

My powers:

Eldrad: Executioner, death mission, doom, fortune

Farseer: Perfect timing, prescience, guide

I went first and it kind of went down hill for brad from there. We discussed after the game that honestly in order for his style list to have a solid chance he needed to either go first or have me roll crummy powers. But this was by far the most fun game I had. Brad and I did some wonky stuff (he had a fire warrior ride around on a skyray all game which just didnt want to die!) Also he still made a game of it, he kept me from getting the relic for 4 turns with some oddly resiliant kroot and I think I lost about half my windriders to dangerous tests! We ended on turn 5 after Eldrad force weaponed his third riptide! (Yeah we had one of them come back to life to try for some redemption). I won the game with full points which put me in second place right behind Sean Nayden for the most battle points of the potential 4-1 players and the third place "Battle Master" prize.

Game 5:

Paul Murphy Space Marines/Space Wolves

Chapter master on bike with lots of wargear

Khan on bike

bike command squad w/ 4x grav gun and apothecary

2x10 tactical squad in rhino's

2x stalkers

wolf lord on wolf w/ saga of bear and lots of wargear

runepriest on bike w/ 2+ armor

1x5 grey hunter pack in rhino

My powers:

Eldrad: Fortune, perfect timing, prescience, guide

Farseer: Death mission, prescience, perfect timing

The game went pretty quick. He scouted forward...I seized...I killed some stuff. Our deathstars went through 3 rounds of combat which involved lots of hit and running. Eventually he had a terrible round of saves in which I inflicted maybe...12-15 wounds? He rolled probably 7-8 1's which killed off wolf lord, chapter master, rune priest, and most of the bikes. The game was pretty much over after that.

I took a full point win which ended me with 70 total battle points which carried me to victory for the 4-1 battle master award! I received a medal (you can watch myself and the other winners getting our awards here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU9t72xzntw&feature=youtu.be) and $100 cash. It was a great weekend!

-Farseer Tsarith

A picture of the army and the cool medal that Torrent of Fire gave the winners!